College of Business

Accurately assessing organizational information technology (IT) is important for accounting professionals, but also difficult. Both auditors and the professionals from whom they gather data are expected to make nuanced judgments regarding the adequacy and effectiveness of controls that protect key systems. IT artifacts (policies, procedures, and systems) are assessed in an audit because they “afford” relevant action possibilities but perception preferences shade the results of even systematic and well-tested assessment tools. This study of 246 business students makes two important contributions. First we demonstrate that a tendency to focus on either artifact or organizational imperative systematically reduces the power of well-regarded IT measurements. Second, we demonstrate that priming is an effective intervention strategy to increase the predictive power of constructs from the familiar technology acceptance model (TAM).

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